Much of today's industrial and municipal waste is processed in incinerators, rotary kilns and/or placed in land fills. As land fills reach their capacities, consideration must be given to providing environmentally sound alternative means to treating waste. Also, while incinerators and rotary kilns serve to reduce the overall volume of waste which must be discarded, they do not provide for the destruction of toxins and dioxins which lead to air and water pollution. In addition, prior methods of disposing waste are often expensive, call for long distance transport, and are considered to be blights on the landscape due to their large smokestacks and the significant amounts of acreage which they require. The present invention uses laser technology to overcome these drawbacks of the prior art.
The laser has been known for years as a worthwhile means for separating isotopes and for enriching material for uses other than those directed to waste conversion as described herein. When a material is irradiated by a laser of sufficient density, a highly ionized gas or plasma is formed by vaporizing the material into a semi-solid mass. In the plasma state, matter can be renewed or stripped apart into individual components. Thus, by exciting a particular mass to its upper energy state, several things happen. Electrons from the material are driven to this upper state and emit photons before returning to ground state. Although the photons have no mass, they have kinetic energy which is released during this transition. As a result, free radicals are caused to bombard the waste material being irradiated, causing the material to separate and bond to other materials to form a new element or compound. Any toxins or dioxins which are released in the plasma field and by irradiation are completely destroyed.
The present invention is directed to reducing, destroying or transforming municipal and industrial waste by using a laser in a reactor vessel. This laser reactor unit is unlike incinerators and rotary kilns of the prior art. The preexisting incinerators and rotary kilns do not generate temperatures above about 2000.degree. F. This temperature is not sufficiently high to destroy toxins and dioxins present in or generated by waste. The laser reactor of the present invention is capable of achieving temperatures as high as 20,000.degree. F., but generally operates in the range of about 6000.degree. F. to about 10,000.degree. F. Toxins and dioxins subjected to these temperatures are destroyed.
The high temperatures attained in the reactor, coupled with the laser's ability to break apart compounds, make the laser reactor system of the present invention ideal for reducing solid or liquid waste into a usable compound by completely sterilizing and reducing waste into a usable factor.
Poisonous gases such as dioxins, toxins and heavy metals are released into the atmosphere during the combustion process employed by incinerators and rotary kilns. These gases are unhealthy for human, plant and animal consumption as they adversely affect most forms of organic life. In addition, the poisonous gases adversely affect inorganic compounds.
The laser reactor of the present invention converts any gases which may be poisonous primarily to oxygen and also to carbon dioxide. The process is concealed from the atmosphere to reduce the risk for any undesirable NOX or sulfide emissions.